Nat King Cole

Critics don’t buy records. They get ’em free.

The people who know nothing about music are the ones always talking about it.

Only time, education and plenty of good schooling will make anti-segregation work.

I make no claim to being a business genius. You can make so much money in this business that it loses its value.

If I could read it, I could play it.

I’m a musician at heart, I know I’m not really a singer. I couldn’t compete with real singers. But I sing because the public buys it.

We’re here to have a ball.

When I got my first guitar my fingers wouldn’t go to the sixth string so I took off the big E and played with just five strings. I was only 6 or 7.

To keep creating you have to be about change.

Music was our wife, and we loved her. And we stayed with her, and we clothed her, and we put diamond rings on her hands.

Perhaps it is a peculiarity of mine that despite the fact that I am a professional performer, it is true that I have always preferred playing without an audience.

If jazz has to be termed as a wave, then music is a sea, but if the reflectors in the water is the chord.

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

I don’t like to look back because the whole point in Jazz is doing it now.

I’ve always liked the Freddie King/B. B. King rich tone, and at the same time, I like the manic Buddy Guy/Otis Rush Strat tone. So I’m always caught in the middle of the Gibson and Fender sounds. If I’m playing my black [Fender] Strat, and I’m in the middle of a blues, I kind of wish I was playing a [Gibson] Les Paul. Then again, if I was playing a Les Paul, the sound would be great, but I’d be saying, “Man, I wish I had the Stratocaster neck!”

When you want ’em you can’t get ’em, when you’ve got ’em, you don’t want ’em.

Bass players are always the intellectual kind, but nobody knows it.

There’s a spiritual satisfaction that one gets from listening and playing good Jazz.

They’re singing your praises while stealing your phrases.

Jazz music has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can’t even buy it. If you could buy it, they’d have it at the next Newport festival.

I keep these songs in my head until I get behind the microphone. I never spend more than 30 or 40 minutes singing the vocal or it will sound mechanical. There are always mistakes, but it’s about feeling more than being perfect.